The Time Machine framework: monitoring and prediction of biodiversity loss.

Transdisciplinary solutions are needed to achieve the sustainability of ecosystem services for future generations. We propose a framework to identify the causes of ecosystem function loss and to forecast the future of ecosystem services under different climate and pollution scenarios. The framework (i) applies an artificial intelligence (AI) time-series analysis to identify relationships among environmental change, biodiversity dynamics and ecosystem functions; (ii) validates relationships between loss of biodiversity and environmental change in fabricated ecosystems; and (iii) forecasts the likely future of ecosystem services and their socioeconomic impact under different pollution and climate scenarios. We illustrate the framework by applying it to watersheds, and provide system-level approaches that enable natural capital restoration by associating multidecadal biodiversity changes to chemical pollution.

Atmospheric science: early peak in Antarctic oscillation index.

The principal extratropical atmospheric circulation mode in the Southern Hemisphere, the Antarctic oscillation (or Southern Hemisphere annular mode), represents fluctuations in the strength of the circumpolar vortex and has shown a trend towards a positive index in austral summer in recent decades, which has been linked to stratospheric ozone depletion and to increased atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations. Here we reconstruct the austral summer (December-January) Antarctic oscillation index from sea-level pressure measurements over the twentieth century and find that large positive values, and positive trends of a similar magnitude to those of past decades, also occurred around 1960, and that strong negative trends occurred afterwards. This positive Antarctic oscillation index and large positive trend during a period before ozone-depleting chemicals were released into the atmosphere and before marked anthropogenic warming, together with the later negative trend, indicate that natural forcing factors or internal mechanisms in the climate system must also strongly influence the state of the Antarctic oscillation.